How did black have a 170 cp loss?
A 124 cp loss is a game fillled with blunders that could probably be played by some 500s. This game didn't look that bad, tbh. It seemed relatively OK.
Also, just playing reasonable moves and waiting for your opponent to give up a free pawn seemed like it worked well enough. Black doesn't have the ability to attack.
How did black have a 170 cp loss?
A 124 cp loss is a game fillled with blunders that could probably be played by some 500s. This game didn't look that bad, tbh. It seemed relatively OK.
Also, just playing reasonable moves and waiting for your opponent to give up a free pawn seemed like it worked well enough. Black doesn't have the ability to attack.
Thanks for looking at the game and the comments!
The 1.70 is because late in the game, beginning with move 31 (see the rating chart below), I made moves that were not true blunders but Stockfish 8 20-ply thought I had much better moves so that piled on lost points. Those better moves were apparently much better because of far-ahead moves, because if I ran it at 12-ply, it rated me 75.32% and only 0.51 cp loss (table at bottom):
Here are the Stockfish 12-ply Lucas Indexes:
You should apply a cap on lucas chess. If the advantage is over 6.00 or something, there should be no such thing as a mistake.
I didn't think you wasted time. You went after your play pretty much as soon as you could (although you could have captured on a5 on move 20).
Maybe the biggest lesson here is how 8...b5 is bad and 9.a4 is the right move. White can build up on the a file (and maybe c6-b5-a6) with the long term plan of axb when white either wants to infiltrate on the a file, or get a passed c pawn (depending on how you recapture).
If you release the tension first (bxa), then white is claiming b4 is not as weak as the a6/c6 targets.
So Na5 didn't make sense, and Bxa5 is good.
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After 6.c5 white is claiming the queenside as his area. You have to work to make your areas the center (with the e5 break) or the kingside (maybe an attack by pushing the h and g pawns down the board).
b5, playing on white's side, only accelerates white's play.
The only exception is that in this game c5 was very early. Sometimes you can claim this is too much space with too little development by hitting back with b6 and if they reinforce with b4 then immediately continue to challenge with a5.
Oh I see in your notes you wanted to prep b6 with your 6th move.
Ok, especially because white continued to ignore development with his moves 7 and 8 that's not bad. I don't know if it would be appropriate every time you see this though. With your bishop on f5 (meaning your queenside light squares a slightly weaker than otherwise) and without your king castled, it could be risky. White is close to having very good play in that area himself.
Thanks for you comments guys - I'm just getting used to Lucas Chess and I will tweak the evaluation process.
I've played and won 4 daily games, 2 against a 1400 player, 2 against a 1600 player (ratings before I beat them), now I've got 4 scheduled against what will be around 1800 players in two team matches May 1 and 8 and feel like the little frog in the big pond. I have a 2116 USCF Correspondence rating, but it's from the 1970's and I'm not sure where I fit now.
I also am seeing a variations in Lucas Chess's Stockfish ratings if I run the exact same analysis more than once, so I'll have to check and make sure I'm not somehow setting different flags. In any case. Here's Stockfish 8, 20-ply's analysis of my moves up through 33 (move 1 is unevaluated book) and you can see they're pretty reasonable up through 30:
I think you'll do well against 1800 players here, judging by your performance. 1800's here aren't very good. They definitely, on average at least, play worse than you did in this game.
I've been having luck with the Caro-Kann and it's cousin the Slav Defenses. But I usually suffer a long siege until squeezing out a small pawn advantage and then using that as leverage to pull-out the game. I know that's part of the nature of semi-closed defenses.
But I can't help but wondering if I should have planned to break free earlier: the first exchange of pieces in this game occurred at move 14 and the second at move 21.
In the following game I felt like the city of Vienna in 1683, under siege for months by the Turks until Austria's ally, Poland, sent in the famed Polish Cavalry to drive the Turks out.
Anyone with ideas for an earlier attack will be appreciated, no matter how risky they may seem.
As usual, chess.com's CAPS index overestimated my play (2100 OTB ELO) and underestimated my opponent (low hundreds):
But, as usual, the freebie Lucas Chess (Stockfish 8, 20-ply) are more accurate, at least in the overall percentage where very high 80%'s to low 90's are Carlsen vs Karjackin games and my 73.82% is a rating for a non-expert player: